the oh-yes! DVD of the week: ‘Fish Tank’: Criterion Collection

If you haven’t seen Fish Tank, one of the best films of 2010 (my review is here), now you have no excuse: there’s a new Criterion Collection edition just out, so it’s not going to get any better than this. British filmmaker Andrea Arnold turns her perceptive eye on female adolescence, a topic usually treated on film with nothing more than flippancy, when it’s treated at all. Here, though, newcomer Katie Jarvis burns with impotent rage as Mia, a poor English 15-year-old desperate for some focus to her life: here are truths of that borderland between childhood and adulthood like we rarely see them… and truths about burgeoning womanhood many people don’t want to acknowledge in real life, never mind onscreen, courtesy of Mia’s encounters with her mother’s new boyfriend, played by Michael Fassbender with a riveting sleaziness. Don’t miss this movie.